Models of manufacturing have mirrored prevalent models of social organization throughout history. The feudal system saw artisan based manufacture of goods, hand-made, non-interchangeable, and without an industry of scale. The industrial revolution brought scale and standardization to manufacturing. It also transferred the hierarchical structure of the feudal system to the dominant form of organization of the industrial age: the corporation. With advances in technology and associated skill demanded from workers in the industrial age, the peasant became literate. Machines facilitated an economy of scale but embodied no skills of their own. Skilled, educated workers were required to operate them. At the end of the 20th century, the advent of the computer replaced industrial production using skilled workers and machines with industrial production using computerized machines and unskilled workers. This in turn has led to an outflow of manufacturing jobs from developed nations to the emerging world. The next phase will see autonomous machines largely without a requirement for the unskilled worker. This process is under way now and manufacturing jobs are under pressure even in the emerging world. Another realm of economics has undergone a similar transformation in the more recent past: information. The catalyst of that transformation was the Internet. During the industrial revolution the group of so-called Luddites riled against job losses among artisans. Now the argument against job losses is much the same. Yet against the argument of the Luddites who would oppose progress and technology stands the testimony of time: the Internet created entirely new segments of economic activity and entirely new types of employment opportunities in the field of information; just like the Industrial Revolution did before. The present disclosure is about proactively managing just this type of transition for manufacturing and adding employment opportunities through automation, not as it is traditionally seen merely subtracting them. Manufacturing, as an industry, has strategic and military significance for any nation. No nation ought to expect to be significant in the theater of world affairs without it. Windows of opportunity, both economic and military, will close for nations in the years that lie ahead. And windows of opportunity will open for nations.
Traditional models of manufacturing utilize the “push-strategy.” What this means is a model of distribution whereby a fixed selection of branded products is “pushed” along a supply and distribution chain that ends with retailers making products available to end consumers according to brand and model. The term “end consumer” is rooted in this model in that the consumer is at the end of this chain. The consumer selects from a fixed set of choices manufactured on an economy of scale. This model makes customized solutions expensive because custom solutions potentially require tailoring all the way along the supply chain, thus negating the benefits of an economy of scale.
Information used to be distributed according to the “push-strategy”—until the Internet replaced this model of information dissemination with a “pull-strategy.” An example will illustrate: An Internet user lives in London, England, and is looking for a restaurant through a search engine. To start, the search engine will have “pulled in” the user's IP address information from a global database of available Internet addresses and presented a UK search page. This is the first customization. The search engine did not create this global database of Internet addresses, nor did it subcontract its making. Rather, it “pulled in” an available service offering. Based on location information, restaurant offerings in the area are presented in the search results—along with a map, marking nearby retailers and restaurants. The search engine did not create that map either. Rather, it will have resorted to a service offering from yet a third provider. The final user experience is the result of multiple layers of information being composed dynamically as they are “pulled in” from independent service offerings. Information technologists refer to this as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Each layer of information is not pre-determined like in the assembly of an industrial product, but rather it is determined dynamically in response to user requests. As a consequence, the end result is customized on a per user basis by default. Only 30 years ago it would have been contrary to established wisdom that this paradigm would prevail against the established “push-strategy” model. Today it is known that the “pull-strategy” prevailed.
In addition to the “pull-strategy” and composition of service offerings on the Internet operating as described, behind the scenes a layered architecture handles the various processes that facilitate interoperability of various concerns in the system. This layered architecture is called the Open System Interconnection Model (OSI). The OSI model layers “meta information” along-side actual information and uses that meta information to coordinate the various services on the Internet. For example, information routing and domain name lookups are ancillary processes, which are managed by the OSI model.
Service Oriented Architectures on the Internet tend to be centralized, and in same cases distributed. Continuing with the example of domain name look-ups, top-level country domains are resolved through so called root name servers. These represent the central authority for each top-level domain. Non-root name servers cache the information from root name servers and disseminate this information according to a defined protocol in such a manner as to balance the workload away from the root name servers. The overall authority over the domain name system remains centralized. In contrast to centralized methodologies, so-called peer-to-peer technologies have emerged on the Internet as a means of decentralized information management. Such technologies include decentralized file sharing as well as cryptographic currencies based on “Blockchain” techniques. Other examples include decentralized contract settlement, also via blockchain techniques. Blockchain techniques involve the use of cryptography. Cryptography on the Internet is used to provide non-repudiation, authentication and confidentiality.
Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) is a formal computer language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems in terms of a process calculus. This process calculus permits describing of and reasoning about the behavior of processes and their interaction algebraically. Failures-Divergences Refinement (FDR) is a proof checker, which permits verification of CSP models and their properties. CSP and FDR can be used to define protocols of interaction between concurrent processes.